TRIGORIN. Yes. Writing is a pleasure to me, and so is reading the
proofs, but no sooner does a book leave the press than it becomes odious
to me; it is not what I meant it to be; I made a mistake to write it at
all; I am provoked and discouraged. Then the public reads it and says:
"Yes, it is clever and pretty, but not nearly as good as Tolstoi," or
"It is a lovely thing, but not as good as Turgenieff's 'Fathers and
Sons,'" and so it will always be. To my dying day I shall hear people
say: "Clever and pretty; clever and pretty," and nothing more; and when
I am gone, those that knew me will say as they pass my grave: "Here lies
Trigorin, a clever writer, but he was not as good as Turgenieff."

NINA. You must excuse me, but I decline to understand what you are
talking about. The fact is, you have been spoilt by your success.

TRIGORIN. What success have I had? I have never pleased myself; as
a writer, I do not like myself at all. The trouble is that I am made
giddy, as it were, by the fumes of my brain, and often hardly know what
I am writing. I love this lake, these trees, the blue heaven; nature's
voice speaks to me and wakes a feeling of passion in my heart, and I
am overcome by an uncontrollable desire to write. But I am not only
a painter of landscapes, I am a man of the city besides. I love my
country, too, and her people; I feel that, as a writer, it is my duty to
speak of their sorrows, of their future, also of science, of the rights
of man, and so forth. So I write on every subject, and the public hounds
me on all sides, sometimes in anger, and I race and dodge like a fox
with a pack of hounds on his trail. I see life and knowledge flitting
away before me. I am left behind them like a peasant who has missed his
train at a station, and finally I come back to the conclusion that all
I am fit for is to describe landscapes, and that whatever else I attempt